The numbingly similar tract homes, endless strip malls and multiple minivans filled with youth soccer players indelibly mark this former Indian mission territory as a Kansas City suburb.

Look deeper, and a more nuanced portrait of Johnson County, Kansas emerges: an economic powerhouse that has eclipsed its big-city neighbor in political influence. An educated community with a vibrant arts scene. And a cultural melting pot where Brazilian grocers and Vietnamese nail salons blend in with the Walmarts and Burger Kings.

Enough, say the Johnson County civic leaders planning a National Museum of Suburban History. Their contention: With more than 50 percent of the country living in places like Shawnee, it's past time to take the suburbs seriously.

"That's a major shift in how we live," said Johnson County Museum director Mindi Love. "There hasn't been a recognition of that change. And there hasn't been a lot of serious study on why that's happening."

That's starting to change. In addition to the national museum, which remains in the planning stage, academia is also slowly embracing suburban studies as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry.

In southern California, the Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at UC-Riverside was formed in 2003 to promote economic research and examine regional planning as well as the political, cultural and environmental impact of suburbia

"The United States is the first suburban nation," he said. "In the end, these are the places ... where we are going to live, no matter what."

I may be right. I may be wrong. But there is a lot of gray area in-between.

Suburban life is only attractive because oil and energy are still relatively cheap. Wait until gas hits $5 a gallon and see how it will begin to suck. Wait until you have to heat and cool a big house with higher energy prices.

Whenever gas was almost $4 a gallon two years ago, it was my suburban friends with long commutes who were bitching about it on their Facebook pages. The city dwellers weren't commenting on it.

It would be interesting to see just how objective such a museum would be. Will it be a sunshine blown up your ass, suburbs are the greatest invention of all time sort of experience? Or will it actually get into the real background of suburbia - racisim, euclidian zoning, massive highway subsidies, backing of the oil and auto industries, etc.?

"I've changed my view of suburbia," he says. We're sitting at the Best Buns Bread Company in the Village at Shirlington, a sort of prefab town square in Arlington, Virginia, designed to be quaint and homey. The streets are fresh red brick. The lampposts are faux antique. The trees are evenly spaced. A color-coded map explains the area's layout, like a mall. The neighborhood's culinary diversity-Aladdin's Eatery abuts Bonsai Restaurant abuts Guapo's-is matched only by its patrons' ethnic lack thereof. We are sipping coffees and munching on identical Ginger Crinkle cookies, when it occurs to me: I am in a David Brooks book. We are Bobos. This is Paradise.

"In my last book, I was pretty pro-urban/suburban sprawl," he explains. Pro is an understatement. On Paradise Drive, released in 2004, was a satirical, pop-sociological exploration of American suburbia, but also a celebration of it. Consumerism wasn't just empty accumulation; it was how Americans express themselves. In the ever-expanding exurbs, he wrote, every man creates his own private bubble, "an aristocrat within his own Olympus."

"Now I'm much more skeptical," he says. For the last three years, Brooks has been researching and writing a book on neuroscience. At least that's his shorthand for it. It's basically about how unconscious processes-in short, emotions-shape our behavior, and what that means for public policy, all told through the stories of two composite, pseudo-novelistic characters. (A working title was How Success Happens, but he dismissed it as too Gladwellian.) Good policy, he argues, should understand that people make decisions emotionally, not rationally. It should also try to foster good habits with "communitarian" solutions like pre-K education, or zoning laws to prevent Wal-Marts from taking over neighborhoods. In other words, says Brooks, "the more contact with other people, the better." Hence his newfound beef with suburbia.

The analyses of census data released Thursday show that since 2000, the number of poor people in the suburbs jumped by 37.4 percent to 13.7 million. That's faster than the national growth rate of 26.5 percent and more than double the city rate of 16.7 percent.

bobbyhawks wrote:It remains to be seen if the faux-urban environments that have been created in the suburbs over the last decade or so will have any lasting power.

Some will. Gladstone or old Overland Park building one project at a time, focusing on density in the middle of existing areas seems more solid than the ones trying to recreate the plaza in greenfields on the edge of the city.

Unless there has been a sudden change in the trends but the last time I read about the death of the suburbs job growth and population growth was still greater in the areas 10 miles and out from the city center. Got any newer stats on this?

We are still in the infantile stages of a post industrial economy. The car is barely a century old and we are still trying to fit it into a reality that has been built on 10,000 years of human history. It's going to take more than 60 years to work out what makes a good urban area vs. a good suburban area. And even then technology is evolving at such a rate that there is no way can we predict what the next iteration will be.

What I do know is it will not be the sprawling suburban highway hell like we have today. That was a knee jerk reaction to the the pollution and war of the early 20th century.

I imagine, with the growth of intelligent and agile manufacturing, we will see more clusters of 50-150 thousand people either in independent cities or conglomerations of cities. In fact, Kansas City might be a good model for this. Specifically the Missouri side. Mid-sized, interconnected cities like Raytown, Lee's Summit, Blue Springs, Independence and KCMO.

Not a futurist but I think what we have now is just a transitional, infantile, beginning to more elegant, technologically advanced communities.

""We're finding that the hottest markets are affordable pockets where a millennial can have success," said Javier Vivas, director of economic research at Realtor.com. "If you're getting good square-footage for a reasonable price, it's going to be a magnet. And it's a plus if you're near hiking trails and hipster hotspots where you can find great restaurants and nightlife."

"Notably, oft-criticized millennials make up a disproportionate share of buyers in eight out of 10 cities on this year's list. That generation is increasingly important to not only real estate but to all sorts of retailers because millennials have surpassed the baby boom generation in size. The US now has 75.4 million people between the ages of 18 and 34.
Realtor.com looked at older members of this generation -- those from 25 to 34 -- and found that their average home ownership rate in the 10 hottest ZIP codes is 50 percent versus 41 percent nationally."

"8. Overland Park, Kansas: A suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park benefits from a strong economy and attractive amenities such as the Atkins Museum of Art and the 50-acre Corporate Woods. Millennials account for 39 percent of new mortgages. Houses sell in an average of 24 days, and the median listing price is $236,454."

""We're finding that the hottest markets are affordable pockets where a millennial can have success," said Javier Vivas, director of economic research at Realtor.com. "If you're getting good square-footage for a reasonable price, it's going to be a magnet. And it's a plus if you're near hiking trails and hipster hotspots where you can find great restaurants and nightlife."

"Notably, oft-criticized millennials make up a disproportionate share of buyers in eight out of 10 cities on this year's list. That generation is increasingly important to not only real estate but to all sorts of retailers because millennials have surpassed the baby boom generation in size. The US now has 75.4 million people between the ages of 18 and 34.
Realtor.com looked at older members of this generation -- those from 25 to 34 -- and found that their average home ownership rate in the 10 hottest ZIP codes is 50 percent versus 41 percent nationally."

"8. Overland Park, Kansas: A suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park benefits from a strong economy and attractive amenities such as the Atkins Museum of Art and the 50-acre Corporate Woods. Millennials account for 39 percent of new mortgages. Houses sell in an average of 24 days, and the median listing price is $236,454."

""We're finding that the hottest markets are affordable pockets where a millennial can have success," said Javier Vivas, director of economic research at Realtor.com. "If you're getting good square-footage for a reasonable price, it's going to be a magnet. And it's a plus if you're near hiking trails and hipster hotspots where you can find great restaurants and nightlife."

"Notably, oft-criticized millennials make up a disproportionate share of buyers in eight out of 10 cities on this year's list. That generation is increasingly important to not only real estate but to all sorts of retailers because millennials have surpassed the baby boom generation in size. The US now has 75.4 million people between the ages of 18 and 34.
Realtor.com looked at older members of this generation -- those from 25 to 34 -- and found that their average home ownership rate in the 10 hottest ZIP codes is 50 percent versus 41 percent nationally."

"8. Overland Park, Kansas: A suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park benefits from a strong economy and attractive amenities such as the Atkins Museum of Art and the 50-acre Corporate Woods. Millennials account for 39 percent of new mortgages. Houses sell in an average of 24 days, and the median listing price is $236,454."

Kind of a meaningless piece of info. Obviously, if you want to buy a single family home, the building stock in the city doesn't exist to accommodate everyone and what is there is beyond the affordability of many people unless one wants to become a true urban pioneer in a lower income neighborhood. The single family market will never be adequate for home buyers by definition, a city that is all single family dwellings is not all that urban. But anyone can see the massive scale in which multi-family housing in the KC urban core is being developed. Clearly, there is a fairly significant shift in where people want to live in KC relative to maybe 10 years ago (and this shift has come to KC later than in most of the rest of the US). The burbs will survive because there simply isn't space for everyone in the urban core of US cities to have a SF home but a house in the burbs is definitely not the pinnacle of the American dream any more.

A look into the future. Maybe it happens, maybe it won't.https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realest ... li=BBnbfcN
"MarketWatch asked housing, real-estate and transportation experts to help illustrate those coming shifts. None had a crystal ball, but they’ve all thought extensively about the effects automated vehicles will have on housing.
The details of their visions varied, but the big picture was largely consistent: They agree that the high-tech innovation brought about by autonomous vehicles will be deeply transformative, though in some ways also strangely similar.
Many Americans will live in densely packed cities, but most of us will still head for the suburbs in search of backyards, an extra bedroom, and fresh air. We’ll use commuting time for work: No one predicts the “death of distance” — the idea that we’d rarely leave our homes again — that accompanied the internet’s early rise.
None of our experts predicted shifts so futuristic that they seemed radical, like a drone helipad for every home. But the transitions they do envision may be more revolutionary than we realize now.
Get ready for more real estate devoted to people and green space, rather than cars; for more options for housing in different kinds of communities; and for the possibility of connecting people and regions that have often been left out."